Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so gradually blends,
does lush young England dissipate. Cricket and football order into
violent action both pairs of extremities, while the upper pair and the
organs of the thorax labor profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its
three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet
Mead, where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the boys.
In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits. In and out of
the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery water that wind between them
glide the little boats. The young Britons take to the element like
young ducks. Many a "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the
mountain wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.

Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go
ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of the two
quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the founder of the
institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440. The first organization
comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten priests, six choristers,
twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor infirm men to
pray for the king." The prayers of these invalids were sorely needed
by the unhappy scion of Lancaster, but did him little good in a
temporal sense. The provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are
non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include two
names which would have illuminated it more than those of any of the
incumbents--Boyle the philosopher, "father of chemistry and brother
of the earl of Cork," and Waller the poet. The modern establishment
consists of a provost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master,
under-master, assistants, seventy foundation scholars, seven lay
clerks and ten choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and
servants"--a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as they would be
termed in this country, numbering usually five to six hundred, do not